The present invention relates to a turbine farm. The invention furthermore relates to a method for this. Moreover, the invention relates to a control system and a control system program for implementing the method.
More generally, the invention relates to a method and/or installation for energy extraction from a flowing fluid. The term flowing fluid is used to refer both to the wind and to flowing (sea)water. The installation is understood to be a system of turbines with a control system (in particular a wind farm).
It is generally known that energy can be extracted from the wind using wind turbines. Both the size of the wind turbines and the number of wind turbines have been increasing rapidly in recent years. Increasingly frequently several turbines are being installed alongside one another in a so-called wind farm. Because of lack of space on land (especially in Europe), turbines are also more frequently installed offshore. Offshore wind farms that consist of tens of turbines or more have now been planned. Although the insight of the experts is divergent in this regard, wind energy is seen as one of the major energy sources of the future. If this becomes reality, many farms of hundreds of turbines will be needed. These types of farms are expensive and therefore it is extremely important that the production of the farms is high, that is to say justifies the costs.
Because a wind turbine extracts kinetic energy from the wind, the wind speed will have dropped behind the turbine. This effect is frequently referred to by the term wake effect or shadow effect and also by the term interference; the loss that the turbines undergo in the lee is termed shadow loss or wake loss. The wake loss in wind farms is frequently taken into account by introducing the farm efficiency figure. This figure gives the ratio between the yield with wake losses, compared with the yield without wake losses. Typical values are between 0.70 and 0.99.
In virtually all parts of the world certain wind directions occur more frequently than others. There is then said to be a dominant wind direction, which is defined here as the wind direction in which the major proportion of the annual production is harvested in partial load operation. The undisturbed wind direction is defined as the wind direction at the location of a turbine or farm, without the influence of that turbine or that farm. Incidentally, the wind direction varies substantially over a short timescale (seconds to minutes); therefore the term wind direction is used to refer not to the instantaneous value but to the averaged value, for example over 10 minutes.
According to present day theory, turbines extract the maximum amount of energy from a fluid if the fluid is decelerated to approximately ⅔ of the original speed at the location of the turbine and to ⅓ approximately 1 diameter behind the turbine. The fractional reduction in speed of ⅓ of the original speed at the location of the rotor is termed the axial induction, which is indicated by the letter a. In the case of maximum energy extraction a is equal to ⅓. By choosing the axial induction to be less than ⅓, the turbine decelerates the wind to a lesser extent and the turbine concerned extracts less energy from the wind, which according to the prior art can be beneficial for the turbine behind it.
Present day wind turbines are frequently designed for an axial induction of approximately 0.28. The value is lower than the optimum because a substantial load reduction is achieved by this means, whilst the fall in the energy production is relatively slight. If a wind turbine reaches its maximum or nominal power at nominal wind speed, then provision is made in some way or other that the power does not increase further with increasing wind speed (above nominal wind speed). The control can be either passive or active and in both cases has the result that the axial induction falls with increasing wind speed. At wind speeds of 20 m/s to 25 m/s the axial induction can fall to below 0.1.
Following from the axial induction, an axial force is defined as the force in the rotor shaft direction exerted by the wind on the turbine. The axial force (Fax) is associated with the axial induction via the relationship Fax=4a(1−a)Fnorm, where Fnorm is a force that is used for normalisation. This force is equal to ½ρV2A, where ρ is the density of the fluid, V the fluid speed and A the rotor surface area that is traversed. If the rotor surface area and the density are known, the axial induction can therefore be determined from measurement of the axial force and the fluid speed.
If a first wind turbine extracts the maximum amount of energy from the wind it is normal that the wind speed can have dropped to less than 50% of the original speed a short distance behind the turbine (for example one diameter). Since the power that can be obtained from the wind is proportional to the third power of the wind speed, the drop in speed means that a second turbine that would be installed in that position behind the first wind turbine would at most be able to achieve only an eighth of the power, compared with the first turbine on the windward side.
In practice such dramatic drops in power rarely occur because the wind turbines are placed fairly far apart. The distance between turbines is usually 3 to 10 times the turbine diameter. Over that distance the slow wind in the wake mixes with faster wind around it, as a result of which the wind speed at the location of a subsequent turbine has not dropped too much compared with the original wind speed. In brief, the shadow effect decreases by increasing the distance between turbines.
The wake problem is not restricted solely to an adverse interaction between two wind turbines installed one after the other in the wind direction, but occurs to a more significant extent in wind farms in particular. The energy extracted by the wind turbines on the windward side in a farm, together with the loss of kinetic energy as a result of mixing (this concept is explained later), inevitably leads to a drop in speed in the atmospheric boundary layer in which the rest of the farm is located. There is said to be exhaustion of energy in the atmospheric boundary layer. In the broader sense there can also be said to be a shadow effect between different wind farms. An entire farm that is located in the lee with respect to another farm can be subject to a substantial reduction in production. Apart from the falls in output already mentioned, operation in the wake can also lead to more fatigue damage to wind turbines.
If the number of turbines located one after the other becomes large, increasingly larger distances between the turbines are needed to keep wake losses acceptable. This means that a large surface area is needed and that the cable lengths between the turbines, and thus the costs, increase. In the case of installation on land a greater distance between the turbines also means that longer roads have to be built, which signifies a further increase in costs. Although placing the wind turbines further apart helps against shadow losses, an appreciable fall in production by the turbines on the lee side in large farms will be unavoidable. The fall can be so large that a farm becomes uneconomic as a result. Losses of 30% or more are generally known from the literature.
In the state of the art a wind farm is frequently so designed that it extends mainly perpendicularly to the dominant wind direction, as a result of which shadow effects can be reduced. In practice, however, the arrangement of the wind turbines is also dictated by numerous other interests, such as: what land or sea surface area has been assigned to the wind turbine operator, what are the other functions of the area, what nuisance is caused by the turbines, how do existing power lines run, etc. Consequently, this option will also only be able to offer a limited solution to the abovementioned problems.
The publication by Steinbuch, M., Boer, de W. W., et al entitled ‘Optimal Control of Wind Power Plants’ in Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, (27), Amsterdam, 1988, describes that the operation of wind turbines on the windward side of a farm with a blade tip speed lower than that at which the maximum amount of energy is extracted can lead to a rise in the total farm production. No physical explanation is given for the result confirmed by simulation.
In the thesis by Corten, G. P., entitled ‘Flow Separation on Wind Turbine Blades’, ISBN 90-393-2592-0, 8 Jan. 2001, it is stated that during mixing of the slow air in the wake with the fast air outside it the impulse of the two mass streams together is maintained but that some of the kinetic energy is lost as heat. In the case of a solitary wind turbine that is running at optimum operation, the mixing loss is approximately 50% of the power generated by the turbine, so that the kinetic energy that a wind turbine extracts from the flow is not equal to the energy generated but is one and a half times as much. In this publication it is proposed to choose the axial induction of the turbines on the windward side in a turbine farm to be 10% below the optimum value of 0.33 (i.e. a=0.30), so that the production of the entire farm increases.
Despite the above literature the prevailing opinion is that wake effects can be better modelled but cannot be reduced. This can be seen, for example, from Hutting, H., ‘Samenvatting technisch onderzoek SEP-Proefwindcentrale’ (‘Summary of technical study on SEP test wind power station’), Kema-Industriele energie systemen, Arnhem, November 1994, in which the following conclusion is drawn: ‘increasing production with a farm control system by taking account of wake interaction does not appear to be feasible’.
More recent confirmation of this standpoint can be seen from the minutes of a meeting held on 23 May 2002 at Risø National Laboratory, Denmark. Twenty experts, some of whom have been working on this topic since 1980, were at this meeting and all attention was focussed on the modelling of wake losses. According to the minutes the effects are large, but it is still not known how large and what precisely determines them. By improving the modelling it can be estimated more accurately in advance how much a large turbine farm in a specific position will produce. This information is, of course, extremely relevant to investors. During the meeting no attention was paid to options for reducing wake effects by operating the turbines in a different way.
To summarise, current thinking is that shadow effect gives rise to substantial falls in production, that placing wind turbines further apart is a remedy that leads to high costs (greater cable length and, on land, longer roads) and to a low power per unit surface area. Because space is scarce, this is a major disadvantage. Not only can less be generated on a given surface area, but many areas (that is to say locations) will also lose out in competition with other purposes if only low production is to be expected. The prevailing view is that although the problem can be better modelled it cannot be solved.
An additional problem of the state of the art is the following: as the axial induction of a turbine increases the turbulence in the wake also increases. Turbines that are in the wake of other turbines can register this (for example from anemometer measurements or from the fluctuating loads on the blades). As turbulence increases there is an increasingly fluctuating load on turbines, which is a disadvantage.
One aim of the present invention is to provide a turbine farm that combats the occurrence of turbulence and goes some way to resolving the problem of fatigue loading of the turbines.